My resume is no longer relevant. It can no longer contain an adequate description of my technical abilities. One can get a much better sense of what I am capable of by looking at my GitHub repositories, my Stack Exchange profiles, and the various courses that I am taking at Udacity and Coursera. The problem is that I have no idea how to tell employers that those are the places to look if they want an accurate description of what I can do.

Every time a recruiter contacts me I gently nudge them towards all the resources I just mentioned and I also provide a link to a publicly visible Google doc that contains my resume along with links to all those resources. Yet, they keep coming back asking for a more descriptive resume.

How can I make it even more blatantly obvious that if somebody wants to hire me then they can save themselves a whole bunch of trouble by just clicking on a few links and browsing around?

The 3-second rule (73 votes)

Look at a resume as a distilled brochure that advertises highlights from your skills and experience. A combination of your GitHub and SO profiles and a bunch of other online resources may be complete and accurate, but it isn't sorted or otherwise prepared for easy reading in any way. People who hire want you to tell them what you think distinguishes you from the rest, so your resume should be written so that you pass the first three seconds of eyeballing; if it doesn't, three seconds is all you get. Nobody can form any useful opinion about your skills in three seconds of looking at your GitHub account page.

If you have too much to fit on your resume, great—pick the absolute highlights, and refer to online resources for more. Aim for 'impressive', not 'exhaustive'.

Know the process (15 votes)

Most HR screening these days done by recruiters and corporate HR departments is automated resume reading. A human never sees your resume/application. A computer program that searches out keywords in a plain text, HTML, or Word document determines if your resume matches the specified job criteria.

If it's a match, a HR person, who knows nothing about GitHub or StackExchange, looks at your resume and double checks the computer results. They may call you on the phone to make sure that you aren't a total loser or liar. Then, they'll submit your resume to the department or client along with a stack of other qualifying resumes. (Smaller companies who don't use a recruiter usually start at this point.)

Then, the hiring manager will begin to sort through a stack of resumes, scanning them for certain keywords/buzzwords and making some subjective judgments. For example, you may have graduated from the same school so you end up on the callback pile. They then ask the recruiter or HR to setup a face-to-face or phone interview for those selected.

In the interview, that's the time you can bring up things that you do online. They'll probably Google you and check out what you've given them after that if they like you in person. However, this can work against you in some organizations. They may think you're too dedicated to outside projects, like a blog or open source projects. They may see a Facebook entry where you're out partying or being openly religious and be offended by it. They may not like your code style or be intimidated by it. Then again, some hiring managers won't even bother to do even a Google search and base their decision on the interview alone.

So, a resume still remains an advertising brochure for you because it's easily automated and quick to read/scan. Online qualifications are generally something that can be a deal maker or breaker after an initial interview with a hiring manager.

Share this story

79 Reader Comments

The comments all touched on it, but the first gate you need to get through is the recruiter. Recruiters like a resume, because it's a quick way to judge whether a candidate has relevant education and experience.

Having said that, I pretty much ignore the resume once we get to the interview process. When I make a hiring decision, it's probabbly 80% based on the technical interview process. If the candidate isn't an enthusiastic problem solver, I don't particularly care about his degree or prior employers.

Barely entering the workforce and as a student, I find Resume's boring and stupid. I understand describing one's experience is important to the employer or corporation but almost seems irrelevant at this day of economic age. Have seen numerous examples of people with great deals of life experience, master's degrees, and it almost seems like they could care less. I'm taking my own entrepreneurship to my own.

edit: Oh, let's not forget the outrageous de-facto habit the nation's large companies are taking action on going through a ridiculous CIA like interviews to have a cashier's spot. 3 interviews are the norm now and I find that absurd. The process of finding a responsible worker is found by giving the opportunity to the person and not through a pre process. It's a joke.

My resume is no longer relevant. It can no longer contain an adequate description of my technical abilities. One can get a much better sense of what I am capable of by looking at my GitHub repositories, my Stack Exchange profiles, and the various courses that I am taking at Udacity and Coursera. The problem is that I have no idea how to tell employers that those are the places to look if they want an accurate description of what I can do.

If you do not have the skills to properly write/maintain a relevant and concise résumé, then perhaps you need to rethink your qualifications. Too many focus upon their technical skills, and so often forget that general communication skills are equally important.

The resume is a summary of your experience. If you expect me, as a hiring manager, to scour the internet looking for your projects, blog posts, and online course work (really, who cares?), you aren't going to be given the least bit of consideration.

Summarize you relevant experience in your resume - think you have "too much" to fit on one or two pages? Wrong, you simply lack the skills required to summarize and highlight the skills that my job posting says I am looking for. If you lack that simple communication skill, I really don't want to hire you.

You need to chill your arrogant attitude. You seem to know so much better? No, you don't...or stay unemployed. Give the recruiter what it wants: resume. Give the prospective employer what it wants: resume.

I understand the reluctance of hiring professionals to look at online repositories for detailed information; it all comes to bringing the costs of the hiring process down. I do have a related issue with the HR staff though, as detailed below.

Why require a resume that may or may not adequately represent an applicant's experience, when it's just as easy to look at one's LinkedIn profile? The latter, along with summaries at similar professional social networks, provides a fairly standardised overview of one's professional life. My info in LinkeIn is always current, and has the added advantage (for those willing to check on me) that I would not tailor it as much as I would a custom-written resume, thereby providing a more complete picture of me and my suitability for a given position.

LinkedIn even has an option to export one's profile, and the auto-generated pdf has more or less the look of a standard resume. So why wouldn't hiring managers save theirs and the applicants' time and simply ask for a link to the profile?

Most people thinking about hiring you probably don't want to spend their time searching the web and reading your work. They want you to summarize what you think your accomplisments are and then they want to talk to you about them.

Most people thinking about hiring you probably don't want to spend their time searching the web and reading your work. They want you to summarize what you think your accomplisments are and then they want to talk to you about them.

It doesn't hurt to show you can summarise your accomplishments, either. No manager wants to have an employee who, when asked "what have you done?", just hands over everything they've done.

I just don't understand why they are mutually exclusive. Why not list everything in your Git on the CV as well? I must admit, I don't work in tech, but in my field we are expected to list experiences outside of employment etc.

I set up my own web site. I list my skills, projects, and so on in detail there. No page limits or anything. If anyone wants the TMI version of my work history, there is it.

I use social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc) as a pointer to that web site. While social media wants to use me for advertising, data mining, and so on, I beat them at their own game and use them to promote myself.

If anyone ever wanted a resume, I would just have a single page with my web site as the source for more details.

the preparation of a carefully salted web presence does nothing to ensure your future employment. the resume will always be relevant, even if the juicy info is elsewhere. it's a map to let an employer figure you out. it may change with the times, but it will always remain.

If you do not have the skills to properly write/maintain a relevant and concise résumé, then perhaps you need to rethink your qualifications. Too many focus upon their technical skills, and so often forget that general communication skills are equally important.

This. As well as sales skills.

In most employment situations, being able to summarize, communicate and sell your idea to the team, customers and/or management is critical. Otherwise there is zero reason not to outsource the code monkey work to <insert name of current cheapest offshore option>.

I just don't understand why they are mutually exclusive. Why not list everything in your Git on the CV as well? I must admit, I don't work in tech, but in my field we are expected to list experiences outside of employment etc.

They should be listed- or, to put more accurately, they should be summarized. If you only have a couple projects you've worked on at Github, then (depending on what else you've done), putting them both is fine. But if you have 30 projects? At that point, you'll want to summarize. You might still list one or two explicitly (picking whatever ones would be the most impressive) and then summarizing the rest.

When crafting a resume, it's good to understand how they'll be used by companies (etc). Without that understanding, it's easy to go off on a very bad path (such as making it 10 pages long, or half a page). Several people have already written quite well about the real purpose of a resume (both on SO and in the comments).

The whole premise here seems to come from a mindset of, "Why won't somebody go through a bunch of hoops and track down information from a bunch of disparate sources, and beat a path to my door for the privilege of hiring me?" And, it's a bit shocking. I can promise I'll never hire somebody with that kind of an attitude. Whenever I have been involved in hiring, we've always had more than one person apply for the job. Consequently, it's a matter of picking between several candidates as efficiently as possible. If somebody sells themselves well, then they go to the top of the stack. If somebody sells themselves poorly, then they go to the bottom of the stack, and I have no reason to try to find out more about them. When I am trying to hire somebody, it is because I am overworked and I don't have enough time to do the work at hand. I certainly don't have time to do all that, plus go on a deep hiring quest. You have to show up at *my* door with something I can skim and make a snap judgement about whether or not you might be interesting and useful to me.

As far as, "I know too much to put every thing I have ever done on my resume," goes... No shit, same with every other idiot on the planet. If I tried to put every instance in which I successfully wiped my ass on my resume, it would be dozens of pages long. Consequently, when I apply for a job, I actually pay some attention to what is involved with the job, make sure my resume has my skills that are most relevant to that job, and send in something that whoever is hiring will want to read. No sense making somebody slog through pages of discussion of every bit of PHP and ruby on rails you have ever written if you are applying for a native C++ developer gig. For the 'generic' resume you keep generally available on your website, go through the same process for your dream job. Or, keep a few variations. (separate Web Designer and C++ Developer resumes, or whatever.)

Anybody who expects somebody else to do all the work when it comes to getting work, probably won't get much (or good) work. I would expect somebody like that to constantly argue with me and act like a diva if I did hire them for some reason. Probably has helicopter parents that will call me to complain if I chew the kid out at work, too.

Barely entering the workforce and as a student, I find Resume's boring and stupid. I understand describing one's experience is important to the employer or corporation but almost seems irrelevant at this day of economic age. Have seen numerous examples of people with great deals of life experience, master's degrees, and it almost seems like they could care less. I'm taking my own entrepreneurship to my own.

edit: Oh, let's not forget the outrageous de-facto habit the nation's large companies are taking action on going through a ridiculous CIA like interviews to have a cashier's spot. 3 interviews are the norm now and I find that absurd. The process of finding a responsible worker is found by giving the opportunity to the person and not through a pre process. It's a joke.

Actually, it would be exactly the reason I wouldn't hire someone like you, provided you used the same type of wording in your own resumé. See, I primarily make decisions on technical ability AND communications skills - all the technical know-how in the world wouldn't be of use to the company or I if you can't get your thoughts across clearly. The fact that you can't use an apostrophe properly, your sentence structure is odd, and you randomly capitalize things, is a flag; not enough to disqualify you, but it definitely doesn't work in your favor, especially with the applicants so competitive these days.

Don't most people get jobs through personal contacts? Most tech cats I know at major companies were picked up through internal people recommending them and all that jazz. Small companies even more-so.

"It isn't what you know, it's who you know" most helpful advice I've ever received.

I've gotten six people I know jobs at my current company, and I myself got the job here because my old boss knew my new boss and said 'Hey, we had a big layoff thanks to getting bought, need any good engineers?'

Of course we all had to also submit resumes for other people to look at. I passed them along, which short circuited the resume selection process, and that's the huge advantage.

Then the owner looks at the resume, says 'This looks pretty good... you've worked with him/her, tell me a bit about them'. I vouch for you (huge advantage 2), then we bring you in for interview to satisfy all the other people you'll be working with, and you (probably) get hired.

Your other option is to get in good with the boss so he just hires you and brings you in. I've seen that on previous jobs, and it's always a total f@#$ing disaster.

Or you just join an adhoc startup over a cup of coffee and have a 1% chance of hitting it gloriously big or a 99% chance of working 14 hour days for a year on promises of future stock returns till it flames out and you move on to the next one. It is actually a fun lifestyle if you're young and have endless energy to burn on that lottery ticket.

I want to ask, how do you find the time to do all that side work on GitHub and so on? I used to do a lot of work for FOSS projects when I was younger, especially as a student, but lately work keeps me occupied, well, full-time. And I've decided that my spare time goes to friends, family and non-programming hobbies. Nowadays the only contributions I make to FOSS are incidental, such as discovering and even fixing a bug in a FOSS project my company is using, and then of course you'd be a dick not to go submit a patch or a bug report.

The people looking at your resume, at least initially, aren't qualified to look at your source code or projects. They want to look at a sheet and see that you "Wrote and maintained a complex web application in Java". Eventually when the resume reaches someone who might do a technical interview, you can refer them to code samples and such, but no resume, no foot in the door.

I dont even know why I read these comments. 75% are too busy being douchey to offer useful advice. Totally pointless.

No, no, a lot of these comments are douchey (mea culpa douchea) but still completely useful and correct. We've just seen so many self-described brilliant slackers who can't do anything useful at this point that we get pretty snippy.

The only time you might not need a resume is when you're well connected or well known by those making the hiring decision. (Or, obviously, if we're talking self-employment or a start-up business where you're one of the folks starting it up.)

The three responses were pretty good, though it was news to me that there is any significant amount of robotic resume qualification going on. Maybe they're thinking of the federal government or something?

Every recruiting firm or hiring dept I've interacted with has been of the sort where recruiters do one of three things to find candidates for job openings:

1 - They search an internal database of resumes.2 - They contact people they know for any referrals they might have.3 - They proactively search LinkedIn, Monster, and other job/resume sites and post the jobs there as well.

Anyway, I've gotten offers where the resume was merely a formality because I was a known quantity, but the majority of the time it's all about the resume getting you that foot in the door. Or, more recently, one's LinkedIn profile.

I dont even know why I read these comments. 75% are too busy being douchey to offer useful advice. Totally pointless.

Do you expect to get serious advice from an on-line forum? I personally come here for leisure. I did learn about Udacity and Coursera here though, and have already signed up for an interesting course --- hopefully will have time to complete it.

Is it just me, or is the answer actually included in the first sentence of the article.

"My resume is no longer relevant. It can no longer contain an adequate description of my technical abilities. "

This seems to be a problem with how the person wrote THEIR resume and not a problem with resume's in general? Ive always been taught that if your resume doesnt accurately describe your abilities, you havent written it correctly? I think maybe the answer for this person would be a new format, something creative, that showed off his abilities. If he programs, maybe he could write his resume in c# syntax? Something like that anyway, get creative, Ive heard of all kinds of resumes. The idea isnt to include ALL of your abilities but just a brief overview of previous work experience and relevant education. Besides that, depending on the job you are applying for, you can get quite creative, or do most employers frown on creativity these days? Im not sure, I havent applied for a job in years. Example of what Im talking about -

Like people have said, the article any many commenters have missed the point of a resume.

A good résumé explains why you're the right person to hire. It is not a list of prior jobs or work experience or technical knowledge, though all of those may be supporting evidence.

Even assuming a hiring manager is willing to comb through SO to deduce your competences, what's stronger: seeing that you've answered a bunch of tough C# questions, or two sentences about how your refactoring project reduced customer service calls by 25%?

I dont even know why I read these comments. 75% are too busy being douchey to offer useful advice. Totally pointless.

Do you expect to get serious advice from an on-line forum? I personally come here for leisure. I did learn about Udacity and Coursera here though, and have already signed up for an interesting course --- hopefully will have time to complete it.

+10

Although I wonder if that was maybe the point of the article in the first place, lol.

I am trying to recruit several engineers for my team. From the recruiters, I get around 3 or 4 resumes *every day*. I also trawl my contacts, contacts of contacts, Linkedin, StackExchange and a bunch of other forums for potential recruits. And I have maybe 1h a day to dedicate to this (because I also have to do *my main job*).

I know about GitHub. I know about StackExchange. I know about Coursera. I use them every day.

*However*, being able to communicate your achievements succinctly and clearly tells me whether you will be able to communicate succintly and clearly the requirements or your results on a project.

if you are telling me that your most important achievement are not in your resume, but somewhere else that I have to go look at, *I don't have time for this*.If you are sending me a resume that is 8 pages in 9pt Times, *I don't have time for this*.If your resume tells me all about your college baseball club, but nothing about what actual projects you worked on, *I don't have time for this*.

See a pattern?

Once you have successfully conveyed to me that yes, you might have the expertise to do what I need done, and won't be *another* of the hundreds of candidates I got a resume from but never was interested in interviewing, then *hell yes* I can and will dedicate to you a larger chunk of my scarce time. I will look at your LinkedIn profile, read the code you have on GitHub, Sourceforge, BerlIOS, etc...

Do you put a link to your Facebook on your business card *instead of your name*? No. Then do the same in your resume.

(Shameless plug: if you are a Java developer, have a good mastery of datastructures, complexity, and scaling, have some basic college math, and are interested in working on pretty damn cutting edge AI, NLP, ML problems in the mobile and social media space, PM me: I am interested in hiring you)

Barely entering the workforce and as a student, I find Resume's boring and stupid. I understand describing one's experience is important to the employer or corporation but almost seems irrelevant at this day of economic age. Have seen numerous examples of people with great deals of life experience, master's degrees, and it almost seems like they could care less. I'm taking my own entrepreneurship to my own.

edit: Oh, let's not forget the outrageous de-facto habit the nation's large companies are taking action on going through a ridiculous CIA like interviews to have a cashier's spot. 3 interviews are the norm now and I find that absurd. The process of finding a responsible worker is found by giving the opportunity to the person and not through a pre process. It's a joke.

And even worse, half the time the job opening is a sham anyway. My mom works for a university, and she tells me that they create a new position and pick a person they want to hire. However, they are required (not sure if it's by law or just university rules) to post the job offering for at least a few weeks on the school's website, bulletin boards, etc. Then for stage two, they do interviews to make it look like the job is being offered, but in their minds, they knew the person they wanted to hire FROM DAY ONE (and the person being hired knows it too, but keeps his mouth shut, of course). But, because the process seemed fair (they interviewed many people and "selected" the best one!) no one complains.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if many other job openings are like this. This sort of thing should be illegal, because that's my precious time you're wasting (sending out resumes, setting up the interview, preparing for the interview, driving there, interviewing, driving home - this takes hours). All this just to make it look like your company isn't a bunch of nepotists. Disgraceful.

.Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if many other job openings are like this. This sort of thing should be illegal, because that's my precious time you're wasting (sending out resumes, setting up the interview, preparing for the interview, driving there, interviewing, driving home - this takes hours). All this just to make it look like your company isn't a bunch of nepotists. Disgraceful.

I hit this at Sony Online Entertainment. They had a post up for years (maybe it's still there) for a position but nobody had actually allocated any budget for that position. So they were basically interviewing for 'If we ever get any money to fill this we've got you on file now! Wow!'

On the plus side, I guess that's slightly better than 'We never had any intention to fill this externally'?

Like people have said, the article any many commenters have missed the point of a resume.

A good résumé explains why you're the right person to hire. It is not a list of prior jobs or work experience or technical knowledge, though all of those may be supporting evidence.

Even assuming a hiring manager is willing to comb through SO to deduce your competences, what's stronger: seeing that you've answered a bunch of tough C# questions, or two sentences about how your refactoring project reduced customer service calls by 25%?

Yes, well said - your resume must be tailored to what your potential employer wants to know. But there is no point in doing that if your potential employee is using automated bots and clueless HR departments to filter you resume before it gets through to someone who have to skills to evaluate your abilities.

The reason you particate projects on github is to have fun collaborating with other interesting guys. You go to conferences and meet these guys, you write blogs, you make commits and people study your code. After all that, you will probably know someone in a company where you are applying for a job, and you will be in a position to send a targeted resume.

It isn't that resumes are dead, but that automated key word extraction from resumes and clueless HR departments are dead. If you are over 35 as I am, then you will find that any 'normal resume' that you write (ie 5 years enterprise Java using framework foobar etc), will be dead on arrival because there will always be someone younger and cheaper than you with more current skills of that sort.

Sounds like many of you try to extract water from a rock. Too much dabble over how a resume should say or not. Isn't the point of a resume to have a brief explanation of your work experiences, list of places hired and such? Or is it a stupid grade school essay to test how well your English is? Annoys me when hiring managers explain how I should write a resume or how I should please them, stupid I tell ya. Especially for low class part time jobs, that give so much emphasis on the hiring, ie. 3 interviews? really? like it if were a CIA job. There isn't really an excuse, either your not hiring me cause you dislike my status, skin color, ear piercing or blank crappy resume, period. Not because of how a resume should be written. It's gotten to a point of ridiculous already. How is easy is to meet the person, do a a quick judgment over him/her for the job and give it to them. If any inconsistency happens within a short time frame, they're dismissed, or is it that their embarrassed to tell him/her in their face?edit: NOT to mention stupid middle-ware systems to judge the applicant. Computers depicting how well they took a pointless multiple choice test for hiring? How the world has become too nowadays.

The resume is a summary of your experience. If you expect me, as a hiring manager, to scour the internet looking for your projects, blog posts, and online course work (really, who cares?), you aren't going to be given the least bit of consideration.

Summarize you relevant experience in your resume - think you have "too much" to fit on one or two pages? Wrong, you simply lack the skills required to summarize and highlight the skills that my job posting says I am looking for. If you lack that simple communication skill, I really don't want to hire you.

This. Communication skills are a huge part of any IT job. You're not working for me if you cannot communicate. The first impression that I get of your ability to communicate is your resume. It says quite a bit about you as a person and a potential employee.

1) I'm only going to scan your resume. Keywords are important in getting me to stop and read more. 2) That said, when I stop, what you say about WCF, WPF, .Net and SQL Server better be both correct and interesting. Don't tell me you wrote Web Services in WPF and UI code in tSQL.

Which leads me to the following PSA about your resume. PROOF READ the damn thing. In IT, attention to detail is a big deal. If you can't be bothered to proof read a single page resume, how can I expect you to follow code standards, review other people's code properly or pay enough attention to your own code. It's one page, at least as far as I am concerned it is cause I never get to page two. Proof read it and make sure it says what you want it to say.

Annoys me when hiring managers explain how I should write a resume or how I should please them, stupid I tell ya. Especially for low class part time jobs, that give so much emphasis on the hiring, ie. 3 interviews? really? like it if were a CIA job. There isn't really an excuse, either your not hiring me cause you dislike my status, skin color, ear piercing or blank crappy resume, period.

Sounds like many of you try to extract water from a rock. Too much dabble over how a resume should say or not. Isn't the point of a resume to have a brief explanation of your work experiences, list of places hired and such? Or is it a stupid grade school essay to test how well your English is? Annoys me when hiring managers explain how I should write a resume or how I should please them, stupid I tell ya. Especially for low class part time jobs, that give so much emphasis on the hiring, ie. 3 interviews? really? like it if were a CIA job. There isn't really an excuse, either your not hiring me cause you dislike my status, skin color, ear piercing or blank crappy resume, period. Not because of how a resume should be written. It's gotten to a point of ridiculous already. How is easy is to meet the person, do a a quick judgment over him/her for the job and give it to them. If any inconsistency happens within a short time frame, they're dismissed, or is it that their embarrassed to tell him/her in their face?edit: NOT to mention stupid middle-ware systems to judge the applicant. Computers depicting how well they took a pointless multiple choice test for hiring? How the world has become too nowadays.

I agree wholeheartedly, so I quoted your entire post.

Quite frankly, in this age of ever growing unemployment even in areas where high qualifications are required, with cut-throat competition between applicants, being an employer who says it's hard to find people tells me that you aren't particularly adept. You sound like a conceited 35 year old spinster who lives in the middle between the military base, engineering school, and baseball stadion, and still complains there aren't enough men.

It isn't particularly surprising that many are confused about how to write a thing as simple as a resume: should one keep it to the point, or should one go out of one's way in order to stand out by being extravagant? Most of you have to offer as an answer anecdotes, but nobody in their right mind can insist that there's one single right way or winning startegy. The realities are such that when there are 100s of candidates for a single opening, it really doesn't matter how well you've written your resume -- as long as you're on the job market and without connections, you're screwed.